* Posts by rho

17 publicly visible posts • joined 19 Aug 2009

Canon climbs atop Facebook with over-the-top pic wrangler

rho

It's a technical solution to a legal and social problem. That they're waving OAuth around like some kind of talisman to ward off the evil eye says something.

Any image, once publicly posted, is subject to copyright violation. "The Cloud" and "OAuth" won't change that. Your vacation bikini pic will be used to sell wombat semen energy drinks in Upper Shitcanistan, and no cloud-service company will prevent it. Read those TOS carefully. I'm sure that Canon is indemnified against any failures of their service.

WebKit devs on Blink fork: 'Two can play that game'

rho
WTF?

BLINK tag, writ large

Fine, fork WebKit. One corporation's needs clearly outweigh the needs of another corporation. I can't help but feel that it's 1997 again and "Best if Viewed in Netscape"-like labels feature prominently once more.

Luckily for every Web developer who are having IE6 compatibility flashbacks, Google is second-best known for abandoning projects that don't sell ads. It's not daft to assume Blink disappears in a year or two; even with the incredible momentum provided by Opera /s.

Twenty classic arcade games

rho
Thumb Up

Overall a good list

I would try to cram in Sinistar (64-way controller! Everything is too fast! Everything is too loud!), Wizard of Wor (eater of many coins), and Berzerk (unkillable smiley face of doom), but that's just personal preference.

Ten backpacks for tech-heads

rho
Thumb Up

North Face Recon

I've used the North Face Recon for a couple of years now, carrying far more widgets and gadgets than probably should. I've used it as a daypack while camping several times as well.

It's comfortable, it does a pretty good job of keeping my back from sweating too much, and it's absorbed quite a lot of abuse. The big mesh pocket in the front is amazingly useful for oddities of all sorts. The waist strap is useless, as in most daypacks, unless you're five feet tall, but the sternum strap is adjustible vertically, which is helpful for the ladies.

I'd say that I'd buy another one again, except based on the current condition of mine I don't think I'll need to buy another one for a long, long time.

Ten iPhone 5 challengers

rho

Re: A bit OT, but...

Assuming they don't have a pile of DRM encumbered books, audio books, and movies they can just copy their music files to their phone. Just plug it in and Drag & Drop.

One can do, but intelligent syncing offers quite a lot. The Apple ecosystem may be a walled garden, but it is actually nice in there. Drag & drop works fine for largely static music MP3s, but not so well for listen-once podcasts, contacts, calendars and photos.

Folks forget, but iTunes began life as SoundJam, which was the WinAmp for Macs. iPhones and iPods have at the root of their DNA a sync conduit to a really good media library app.

My mobile is a Blackberry, and has been for many years, but I don't use it as a media player. I carry a separate iPod Touch for that, because it's far and away the better device for such things.

With the iPhone 5 I'm considering dropping the BB for the first time. Partially because RIM seems to have imploded, and partially because carrying two devices instead of one seems daft. I hesitate only because I like physical keyboards (and BBs have the best).

I considered going to an Android phone, but I can't find a real reason to do so. I use a Mac as my primary machine; I keep my contacts in Apple's Address Book and my schedule in Apple's iCal. I use Apple's Mail, and iTunes. I've used other versions of all of these apps, and Apple's versions work at least as well, and often better. So, in that case, why wouldn't one move to an iPhone rather than an Android phone?

Reg hack uncovers perfect antidote to internet

rho
Unhappy

Re: Barrier tape?

For 5 days we had had 415V coming out of the sockets in our offices, reception and 15 holiday apartments.

That gave me the full-body piss shivers. Horrific.

That well is awesome. Simple--therefore reliable--and very clever in its simplicity.

iPhone spontaneously combusts on CCTV

rho
WTF?

Cue casual walk

I dunno, does anybody walk like that in real life? It seems to be a very affected casual walk. "Me? I'm just strolling from my van with a recent purchase in a bag, oh wow my trousers are smoking."

What is he doing in the van for the first 5 seconds? Meditating? He's utterly motionless.

It could be real. It looks staged.

Ghost of HTML5 future: Web browser botnets

rho
Meh

Re: So what is the point of HTML5?

It's one better than 4.

Dell Latitude E6220 12.5in Core i7 notebook

rho
Trollface

Dell/Sony/Toshiba/Apple/Russian/American

...all made in Taiwan!

Node.js Native breakthrough: cloudy C++ on steroids

rho
WTF?

Javascript simplicity

Wow, the simplicity of Javascript.

It's Lisp, with an extra set of braces.

Facebook files for IPO, seeks $5bn

rho
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5thousandmillion

I didn't read any of the IPO documents, but is there anything there regarding paying dividends to shareholders?

Dividends are a pretty good metric for judging a stock's performance. Now that the Greater Fool theory of investing looks like a handbook on how to turn a million dollars into half a million dollars in 30 days or less.

El Reg in email address blunder

rho
Thumb Up

Thank goodness!

Will this be the end to my crushing loneliness?

Facebook HipHop serves 70% more traffic on same hardware

rho
WTF?

Bad arguments

1. "Why don't they just program in C/C++ to begin with?" Why don't you? With your faster C/C++ Facebook clone you should take over the world!

2. "Why would anybody use Facebook anyway?" Because they're not special little snowflakes like you.

3. "PHP sucks!" And it's behind a lot of the most popular Web sites and services available today. Those PHP developers sure are dumb.

Arkansas cop tasers 10-year-old girl

rho
Grenade

A lot of issues here

First of all, there are tantrums and then there are tantrums. Maybe it was just a kicking, screaming fit. Maybe it was a full-on pseudo-seizure. Ever see a kid have a hair-tearing fit? They actually could hurt themselves. Mom may be to blame for the emotional problems, but that doesn't change the fact that maybe the girl was seriously out of control.

While I'm sure any police officer could easily restrain a 10-year-old, the problem here is the 10-year-old is not interested in being restrained, and in order to settle her down there's a real chance the officer could seriously injure her. The guy very likely felt that the taser was the course of least harm.

All that said, this was almost certainly a bad decision all around. Mom shouldn't have called the cops, and the cop shouldn't have used the taser. I'm not exactly sure what should have been done, but I'd guess that were I there I would have tried to restrain little miss precious as well as I could to keep her from hurting herself, kick in the nuts or no. That's part of being an adult--you have to be the adult even if the kid's a little shit. Eventually she'd tire herself out. But if she was one of those ginormous fatass kids I see around these days, I dunno, I'd sure think hard about a motivating electrical shock.

Apple tablet will 'redefine print,' says rumor mill

rho
Jobs Halo

Lower the barriers

"What once used to be purchasable from multiple outlets, resellable, loanable and available in a common format (letters on a page) will instead be locked into a proprietary format, that doubtless Apple will hold the keys to."

On the other hand, a low-barrier to publishing allows greater diversity of works to consume.

The counter-argument to that is that the high-barrier acts as a shield against dreck. Nobody who's been to a bookstore recently can make that argument. What's available now is dreck, but easily marketed dreck. The current ecosystem keeps out folks like Penny Arcade, who are profitable, if not in the way that appeals to a big publishing house.

Reserving judgement for the actual product, but for now it sounds very interesting.

How to run Mac OS X on a generic PC

rho
Terminator

Worth the price for a whitebox Mac Pro

If you're cobbling together something for basic stuff, then no, this isn't worth the price. But you can put together a very nice Mac Pro-alike for a bit less money and then the £253 makes more sense. That is if you can beat the price of the pukka job by 30% or so.

Apple loses students to netbooks and Windows

rho
Jobs Halo

Revive the Duo!

Yeah, not likely, but the Powerbook Duo was a really awesome setup. Expensive, sure, but all Macs were spendy then.

Not that that would fix the issue, which is cost. A MacDuo and a Dock would be at least as spendy as a Macbook. But I sure would dig it.